no longer forgotten music,
underground counterpart to Ubuweb. The stupid but
obvious appreciation would be merely sentimental and historicist.
Listening to a ca. 100 hour selection [of which a semirandom
selection could include de Fabriek, Peter Sterk, Horst Rickels, Ynse
Vugts, Moniek Toebosch, Schlaflose Nächte], it matters little from which
period and culture the audio is from, but all the more that it's
improptu, unpretentious and surprising. The best of it defies both
categories and musical stereotypes of either pop music or academic
avant-garde. (The cheap, low tech, read-writable technology of the tapes
might have helped in this respect; sentimentalizing and
retro-fetishizing it, however, would this work further injustice. The
anonymous blogger is thus right selling those tapes while keeping the
mp3 files.)

...as a platform for electronic publishing for long term-storage and
reference. One might embrace this instability, as net.art has done from
early on. But it means that the world continues to be stuck with print
books and journals for all "serious" publishing, with all the negative
- and no longer necessary - implications for public access to
information, research, study and learning opportunity outside rich
institutions and countries.

Reasons why the Web is broken for long-term electronic publishing:

The URL system is broken since it doesn't sufficiently abstract from
physical server addresses. This has always been a problem, but has
escalated with the (a) commercialization of the Web
and (b) proliferation of content management systems:
(a) URLs rely on DNS, DNS does not abstract enough from IP addresses
and has been tainted by branding and trademarks.
(b) Content management systems create internal namespaces (that taint
URLs and document structure) and are highly unstable, getting
rewritten/replaced every couple of years. If a document exists on a CMS,
it's unlikely to survive years on its URL. (Ultimately, CMS create just
another layer of spam to the Web.)

As a side-effect, any kind of reference to an online resource - be it
a citation, link or embedded quotation - can not reliably made, which is
why the WWW has not met its original goal of providing a distributed
hypertext system.

Still, the Web is not distributed enough because web servers provide
single points of failure (and document death - an issue closely linked
to the URL and DNS system).

HTML does not provide enough structure for research-level publishing.
More capable alternatives such as extended XHTML, DocBook XML and TEI
XML have not succeeded because their complexity is too much for people
trained on graphical software that emulates, and thus artificially
extends, analog tools and their work flows. Because of this legacy, not
even the rudimentary semantic markup structure of HTML has been widely
understood and used.

Changes / editing histories of documents can only be tracked on the
level of individual content management systems (such as Wiki engines),
not the Web as a whole. However, built-in revision control and version
rollback are a necessary precondition for reliable referencing of
documents. [Ted Nelson had that figured out in the 1970s.]

What could be done:

Introduce a new document identifier/addressing system that fully
abstracts from DNS, using cryptographic hashes as document identifiers
and a distributed registry for those document hashes.

An autosystemic, yet very sensible definition of art (which could be
easily mistaken for being conservative although it isn't - since it even
the disruption of styles can only exist in relation to a history, and
historical consciousness, of styles):

"If art is not a means of self-fulfillment and expression, what is it
then? A kind of parascience, with a system of rules that is several
millennia old. Art builds upon the history of art and styles, on
preceding developments. That is the material to which everyone wanting
to do art has to relate to. It does not suffice to have an art school
degree, to be able to stretch up a canvas, somehow organize things
visually and think that this would amount to a work of art.
Nevertheless, an artwork may be greatly successful out of that
misunderstanding."

Asked by Rotterdam's WORM.shop to compile its
next "Top 9" selection of music, films and books available in the store:

Peter Tscherkassky, Films from a Dark Room (DVD)

Tscherkassky's multi-layered found footage films are as visually and mentally intense as cinema can possibly be - rare examples of film reaching the density of the best poetry and music. They are a historic high point of experimental film while drawing on the language of big screen movies.

Francis Picabia, La Nourrice Américaine (CD)

A piano piece first performed at a Dada soiree in 1920 and consisting of only three infinitely repeated notes. More radical than the "Vexations" of Picabia's close friend Erik Satie, it anticipates La Monte Young and Terry Riley by forty years.

Wha-ha-ha, Getahaitekonakucha (CD)

A hidden gem from the early 1980s if not the best record of that whole decade: Free Jazz mixes with and is interrupted by cartoon soundtrack music, schmaltzy synth pop, theater pieces, Japanese folklore, dub - composed and played with unmatched wit, inventiveness and virtuosity.

Cornelius Cardew, Chamber Music 1955-1964: Apartment House (CD)

Early, interesting works of the later member of AMM and founder of The Scratch Orchestra. Cardew, a student of Stockhausen who later renounced his teacher as an "imperialist", is still finding his own way here between strict serial composition, Cagean indeterminacy and non-academic radical improvisation.

Coolhaven, Strømbloque Phantasiën (CD)

An opera based on the German autobiography of David Hasselhoff, with its text as both the libretto and musical MIDI score, performed by guest singers and the band - Peter Fengler from De Player, Hajo Doorn and Lukas Simonis from WORM - itself. What more needs to be said about this instant contemporary classic by Rotterdam's super group?

Dieter Roth is little known "outside" but has been highly influential inside concrete poetry, Fluxus and postpunk underground culture. The latter - among others: Wolfgang Müller, Namosh and Stereo Total - pays posthumous tribute to the German-Swiss-Icelandic universal artist here with musical adaptations of his poems: "When life straightens up again / after falling into the pit / then I've spotted the pitfall / and beat life to shit".

Jodi, SPAM (book)

Not untypical for Jodi, this work simply is what its title says - a printed collection of Internet spam that turns into "concrete" poetry and art in the most literal - yet, as always in jodi's work, strangely beautiful - sense.

Satan's Bed (DVD)

A 1965 black-and-white exploitation flick directed by the notorious Michael ("Snuff") Findlay starring Yoko Ono, back then the best established artist of the New York Fluxus group, as a mail order bride kidnapped by lowlife sex fiends. Shot one year before Ono's famous "naked butts" Flux[ploitation] film, this one however didn't make it into the modern art canon.

Electronic interpretation of Francis Picabia's infinitely repeating three-note-one-pause musical piece La Nourrice Américaine (1920), using only sinewaves (at 69.30, 87.31, 77.78 and 0 Hz) and a tempo of 60 bpm repeated 840 times (lifted from Picabia's close friend Satie). Quick-and-dirty sequencing with LMMS, editing with sox. Rationale: The first of the two piano interpretations by Tom Feldschuh published by LTM on CD is too fast, the second too slow. In 1920, the piano was arguably the most generic and impersonal musical instrument, today, the sine wave certainly is a better match to Picabia's industrial object drawings from that period. Question: Is the correspondence to Picabia's Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité from 1915, showing a light bulb with "For-Ever" printed on, coincidental or not?

Re-issue of Meet Lt. Murnau, 1983:
"Lieutenant Murnau was invented as the name of a ghost musical group. It was started in 1980 and ended in 1984. The image came from a photograph of film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau while serving as lieutenant in the German army. This photograph was taken and reproduced onto posters, leaflets, fanzines, badges and all other memorabilia of pop mythology to create an interest in something that did not exist. The next step was to provide Lt. Murnau fans with invisible music. I managed to produce various records and cassettes without playing a single note, simply releasing mixages of recorded music. The 'Meet Lt. Murnau' tape, for example, was a deliberate confusion of Beatles and Residents records. I also used soundtracks of F.W. Murnau's films and music provided by other groups in hommage to Murnau. To mess up things even more, I had some of these tapes and records released in different countries by different people. Lt. Murnau also appeared on stage, masked, mixing different records and crucifying a Beatles LP. Hundreds of life-size Lt. Murnau-cardboard masks were printed which people could wear. Anybody could make Lt. Murnau music and become Lt. Murnau, and a few people did it. The whole project was focussed on a very limited idea, that of underground music, and did not have the broader implications of the Monty Cantsin philosophy. Yet, I think, the problems remain the same." (Vittore Baroni)

Completed video [1:26 min.] of the second Tape Treff at Extrapool, Nijmegen,
according to Frans de
Waard
"an evening on cassettes [...] hi-jacked by not always stable noise
makers who think its still shocking to run around naked and throwing up
on microphones":

The notion of "system" is as much unfiltered cybernetic/behaviorist
ideology as it is undisputed, building the foundation of all discourses
from general systems theory to contemporary media studies. A critique of
idealism (Platonist as much as Pythagorean) finally needs to include a
critique, and rejection, of "system" as a fiction disguised as
science/engineering. While it might have some value as speculative
(science) fiction in the past, the blatant reductionism and control
fantasies behind it have become too obvious; viz. the collapse of
cybernetics around 1969 - history repeating itself.

There are, to put it diplomatically, issues with this manifesto, both in
its precision of terminology and critical thinking. First of all, the
term "digital humanities" is fuzzy. Does it mean the cultural study of
digital information systems, or simply the use of these systems in
humanities research and education? If the latter is meant, why
differentiate between humanities and other fields of study and not talk
about "digital technology-based research and education" in general?

Paragraph 1 of the manifesto states that...

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent
practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the
exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or
disseminated.

This is a straightforward paraphrase of McLuhan's "end of the Gutenberg
Galaxy", with the only catch that McLuhan referred to analog media -
film, radio, television. So it seems as if the authors thoroughly
confuse "electronic" and "paper" with "digital" and "analog". But,
technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but
a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus
computable] units.

On top of that, there are very contemporary positions in the so-called
'new media' field that are much more differentiated and a few steps
ahead in their reflection of the relation between online and print
publishing. In his introductory essay to the first Mag.net reader,
Alessandro Ludovico soundly argues that "print is becoming the
quintessence of the web", a stable long-term medium for which the
unstable medium of the Web serves as a production and filtering
platform.

Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution
looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print
was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating
search and retrieval.

The common assumption that media studies suffer
from a lack of mid- and long-term memory is a confirmed by this
paragraph. Historically, the opposite is true. In their "first wave of
the digital revolution", the humanities chiefly associated the new
technology with holographic visuality of "virtual reality" and
"cyberspace". The humanities needed about ten years to catch up and
grasp that computing and the Internet was based on code, and thus on
linguistic logic.

Now it must look forwards into an immediate future
in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.

First of all, "the digital" is not a medium, but a type of information;
information made up of discrete units [such as numbers] instead of an analog
continuum [such as waves]. The medium - the carrier - itself is,
strictly speaking, always analog: electricity, airwaves, magnetic
platters, optical rays, paper.

To insist on this terminological precision is not just some
technological nitpicking, but of political significance. It reminds of
the concrete materiality of the Internet and computing that involves the
exploitation of energy, natural resources and human labor, as opposed to
falsely buying, by the virtue of abstraction, into the "immateriality"
of "digital media".

The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and
retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative,
interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital
toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities:
complexity.

As it remains totally vague what this "second wave" represents - YouTube
and social networking as the next evolutionary step after Google Search?
[Seriously? How young are the people who wrote this?] -, it is
nearly impossible to seriously discuss this argument. It also seems
quite futile to argue whether the humanities or sciences have the better
grip on "complexity" - a word which is a systems theoretical null
signifier typically serving as a dialectical device for reducing the
very thing it means; saying that something is "complex" is a truism, and
thus a simplification.

Aside from that, the above argument is seriously flawed in its implicit
assumption that there was no, or less, social and cultural complexity
involved in what it calls the "quantitative" formalisms of databases and
programming. It's a blatant regression behind the research of critical
media scholars [like Matthew Fuller, Wendy Chun, McKenzie Wark and many
others] and hacker activists of the past decade; research that has shown
again and again how these very formalisms are "qualitative", i.e.
designed by human groups and shaped by cultural, economical and
political interests through and through.

And the words in this paragraph are just as empty because they state
a completely generic truism.

The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open
doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized
for what it is: the enemy.

I'm slightly tempted to put the above paragraph, as a sarcastic joke,
into my E-Mail signature, because it is the perfect [if for sure
unintended] joining of the ideological opposites of a liberal Popperian
ideology of "the open" with a right-wing Carl Schmittian agonistic
rhetoric of "the enemy".

I'll stop here in order not to produce a prolonged rant - and sincerely
apologize for my harshness if the "Digital Humanities Manifesto" should
turn out to be a text written by younger students.

The dire need [and current] lack of a critique of "system", i.e. not a
critique of one system (operating system, financial system, political
system), but of the very notion of system itself that obscures more than
it clarifies. System as a speculative, un-empirical [scholastic]
proposition that is a signifier without an empirical signified; a claim
that certain entities or phenomena can be summarized under the same
concept without any objective backing.

What we are experiencing now is not the collapse of systems or
ideologies, but the collapse of the ideology of systems. [Bertalanffy,
General Systems Theory, cybernetics, structuralism, media theory,
Heidegger's philosophy of technology.] "System" as the empty signifier
having replaced the older empty signifier of "God". A vehicle of
suspending/postponing individual agency and responsibility, with "the
system" as a general excuse. If there is something to
unite "systems", it is this very fiction (permeating structuralism,
anthropology, sociology, economy, science and computing, media studies).

What would a culture - a politics, economy, humanities and science,
engineering and technology - be that would radically do without a
fiction of "system"?